The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 269 No 7225 p732
23 November 2002

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Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee (www.psnc.co.uk)
Young Pharmacists Group (www.ypg.info)

Doubts over prescribing training funds

Funds from the global sum will not be siphoned off and given to primary care trusts to pay for pharmacists to undertake supplementary prescribing training, Sue Sharpe, chief executive, Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee, said during a question time session at the Young Pharmacists Group annual conference in London this week.

The issue is whether or not pharmacists are included when funds are allocated by the Government for training, she said. The training of nurses was funded by the Government, but the Government would say that nurses are all in the employed sector. "Just as they will fund nurses within secondary care, and some in primary care, so they will fund people who are directly employed within the managed service, but cases where they get ambivalent include community pharmacists," she commented.

Mrs Sharpe said that the first training courses on supplementary prescribing should start in the spring. Community pharmacists, together with primary care and hospital pharmacists, are expected to be included in these early programmes. "If community pharmacists with diplomas want to claim exemptions from parts of the training programme, that is going to be for them to sort out with the accrediting bodies."

It will be primary care trusts who will decide who they want to train in primary care and secondary care trusts for secondary care. "The issue may come within community pharmacy of whether PCTs will be happy to fund wholly the private sector." she added.

However, Gul Root, Principal Pharmaceutical Officer at the Department of Health said at another session during the conference that funding for training would be available through the workforce confederations from April.

Martin Anderson, commercial director, Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, said that training requirements and the potential use of supplementary prescribing pharmacists will differ between primary and secondary sectors. Although he thinks that it can work in both sectors, he said: "It is easier for me to see it working a secondary care environment because of the access to records, than in primary care."

Tony West, chief pharmacist, Guy's and St Thomas' Hospitals, said: "I think it would be a failure for the profession if there was not legitimised supplementary prescribing by pharmacists, whereever they may be based, by this time next year."

Answering a question on whether technicians dispensing and handing prescriptions to patients in the absence of a pharmacist is a risk or an opportunity for pharmacists, Mr West said that it is a case of whether safe systems at work can be provided without the pharmacist present and how far away you can take the pharmacist from the process. Pharmacists still need to be there for prescriptions that do not fit protocols, he said.

Mrs Sharpe added that there is a need to consider what is best for the patient and that is for the patient to have access to the pharmacist for clinical input. She questioned why the pharmacist should be moved out of the pharmacy. "The PSNC thinks that there is an enormous amount that the pharmacist can do in the pharmacy and it simply does not make best use of the pharmacist resource if they are not there."